


Chamomile, Bluebells, Forget-Me-Nots

by diabhals



Category: Beneath - Fandom, Reqiuem - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, Flashbacks, Language of Flowers, M/M, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, bc im a hoe for symbolism, crossover fic, religion as a metaphor for love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:29:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24295876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diabhals/pseuds/diabhals
Summary: Saphir makes a flower crown and wonders...
Relationships: Saphir van Zelingen/Foti Hansen
Kudos: 2





	Chamomile, Bluebells, Forget-Me-Nots

_ Chamomile means strength in adversity _ .

Saphir’s hands don’t work as well as they used to; the burns make him clumsy, fingers trembling and not moving how he wants. The flowers laid out in front of him glare sullenly, issuing their challenge:  _ you can’t do this. You don’t know how. You never did -- how can you learn now _ ?

_ Chamomile means strength in adversity. _

Picking up the first flower, his hands tremble. The numbness comes and goes, but it’s here now, those fingers feel achingly foreign,  _ disconnected _ . The hands of a different man. Yet he still manages to pierce the stem with a thumbnail, a tear of sap weeping out; after that, feeding the next stem through the hole feels easier, a dent made in the work. The first shot of the engagement fired, the first step taken.

_ Chamomile means strength in adversity _ ; for Saphir chamomile is the bruises on Foti’s face, the ones they never talk about. The ones he kisses,  _ softly softly softly _ , when he wants to scream, he wants to throttle that hurt, he wants to tell it  _ how dare you touch him _ . Not an it: he knows where --  _ who _ \-- those bruises come from, every time he sees them he wants to make her suffer in ways she probably hasn’t even considered. But chamomile means strength in adversity, it means swallowing the acid of his anger, letting it burn his throat because that means he gets to hold his love.

Eventually, he’s holding a ring of chamomile flowers, a crown-in-potential wavering in his shaky, scarred hands. It’s  _ beautiful _ \-- delicate, fragile, graceful in a way he can’t truly express but makes his chest clench all the same.

_ Bluebells mean humility _ .

Here’s the fiddly bit: knotting bluebells around the chamomile stems, interspersing white with jewels of blue. The crown jerks in Saphir’s hands as he tries to thread them through, frustration building, making his hands shake all the more -- he used to be able to do this, used to be able to twist a sword with a single finger, now his hands feel like lead, too clumsy to even handle something so beautiful.

Suddenly, the flowers jerk from his hands.  _ Fuck _ \-- Saphir scrabbles at them, they’re so  _ thin _ and delicate, always slipping through his fingers at the last moment, taunting him.  _ Look at you, thinking you could make something beautiful. Thinking you can  _ **_love_ ** _ something beautiful, thinking you could possibly give him what he needs. You’re only broken, damaged _ \--

“Shut up!” Saphir slams his hands down on the table, ragged, racing breaths eventually petering out. Now the rush of frustration is bleeding away, all he’s left with is the crown, half-finished, still staring at him. Asking him what he’s going to do now.

_ Bluebells mean humility _ ; for Saphir, that means Foti as he prays.  _ Devotion _ , there’s something the scarred soldier should understand, something his lungs comprehend perfectly, smoke-laden and aching as they are. How ironic, then: he’s never felt at ease on his knees, never serene, never blessed, never  _ comfortable _ \-- all he feels is painfully, incomprehensibly vulnerable. Yet his love never  _ looks  _ anything but sublime, gilded in floods of sunlight that spill through church windows; he wears devotion so beautifully, he almost makes Saphir believe in the Stitched Goddess again.

Releasing a shaky, pent-up sigh, Saphir picks up the flower crown once more.

_ Forget-me-nots mean memories _ .

The finishing touch: airy sprays of sky-blue and bonbon-pink worked into the crown, giving it an ethereal lightness. Frowning at the flowers, Saphir bites his lip as trembling, uncooperative hands work the minute stems in, teetering on the edge of snapping them, breaking them,  _ he’s ruining them -- _

His eyes close for a moment, and he’s lost. Lost to the war: it comes rushing back, eager, slavering with stinking bile, sinking its teeth into his mind. Flashes come back to him, fire, the barking boom of cannonfire, the hiss and snarl of flashing swords. Mostly fire, grenades going off behind his eyes, flames licking, snapping at his heels as he runs -- 

Oh, he wishes he could’ve ran. Wishes he was as selfish as Galatea -- yet wishes he could’ve saved them all.

Twelve was only a consolation when he forgot how many he’d condemned to a skin-shrivelling, bone-cracking death.

_ Forget-me-nots mean memories. _

A different kind of memory, then: just as soon as it came, the ravening dog, war, slinks away, leaving Saphir breathless, shaking.  _ Always  _ shaking. The room seems unreal, as if the present isn’t quite ready to accept him into it again.

Saphir realises he isn’t quite ready to return.

He remembers the day it happened, the day he looked at Foti and --  _ really _ looked. The realisation tore into him like a bullet, piercing,  _ blinding _ ; Saphir didn’t so much fall in love as stumble into it blind, as a soldier reeling from battery-smoke does. Ever since that day, he’s been unable to look at Foti without noticing something new to love: the curve of his lips, the softness of his hair, that soft, heart-aching little smile he gets when someone compliments it. All that, and the things its impossible to see, the lilt to his voice that even makes the war-dog in the back of Saphir’s mind stop and wag its tail, the quiet beauty of his existence.

_ Forget-me-knots mean memories _ , and Saphir will remember this forever: he’s starting at a finished flower crown, messy, rough around the edges, but  _ complete _ . A wave of pride rushes through him: he  _ made _ this with his trembling hands, dreamt it up with his damaged mind. He  _ made _ it, and it’s real.

_ Forget-me-nots mean something else, though. Forget-me-nots mean  _ **_true love_ ** .

Scooping up the crown, Saphir slips over to where Foti is praying, so absorbed in his devotion that he doesn’t even notice. So  _ beautiful _ , even if Saphir will never understand the attraction of surrendering to a divine power -- yet he places the crown on his lover’s head with all the reverence of a worshipper.

_ That _ makes Foti notice; Saphir takes advantage of the distraction to dive in for a kiss, dropping to his knees as well, all the better to cup his lover’s cheeks and kiss him, dizzily,  _ ecstatically _ , practically drinking him in as if he were communion wine. He certainly tastes as sweet, as heady, lips almost intoxicating; Saphir finds prayers in the form of moans slipping past his lips, worship in the form of adoration.

He only pulls away to whisper one thing, the sweetness of the kiss still lingering:

_ You look beautiful. _


End file.
